Food & Drink

Cuozzo to NYC restaurants: 10 things I hate about you

Inedible sweets. Ridiculous menus. Inquisition-style seats. There’s no end to restaurant nuisances, especially if you love exploring the city’s “must-try” spots.

I’ve been to more than a few this year. Herewith, a compilation of recent follies and fiascoes — they never learn, do they?

MARROW MADNESS

The bloody, gelatinous beef-innards-ooze in a bone is not an acquired taste. Either you have it or you don’t. I do. But it’s popping up uninvited and ridiculously presented all over town, because it guarantees instantaneous drooling by food writers wildly out of touch with what normal people eat. Williamsburg’s Aksa now serves it with oatmeal. Bad to the bone.

FALSE DESCRIPTIONS

Red Gravy is in Brooklyn, where an estimated 1 million people now work in artisanal pickle manufacturing. “Pickles” is the name of a dish on Red Gravy’s menu. On information and belief, as lawyers say, I’m entitled to expect actual pickles.

But it was pickled vegetables. While some waiters talk too much, ours never mentioned what we were really getting.

PUNITIVE SEATING

You don’t expect rough-hewn downtown spots to be luxurious. But they increasingly regard even minimal human dignity as a silly, costly anachronism.

Pearl & Ash dispenses with backs for roughly half its seats. At new Le Philosophe, our “banquette” was a rock-hard, low-slung church pew-like affair.

At least they include cushions. At The Quarter, a cushionless bare-bones Hudson Street storefront, dishes cost up to $28 — but our butts took a worse beating.

NO SALT ON TABLES

Is it the Bloomberg effect? We should not have to beg. At all but a precious few great restaurants, salt should be on every table — in a shaker. It should not be grudgingly presented in a thimble with a tiny spoon. The Harlow waitress, who seemed baffled by our request, brought us an un-sprinkleably coarse grind in just such a dish — without a spoon. Should we use a nail file?

GORDON RAMSAY

Of all the recent ridiculous news involving the globe-trotting, Michelin-star-flaunting TV clown, the scariest was word — still not definitively refuted — that he might take over Jeffrey Chodorow’s China Grill and turn it into a steakhouse. Do us a favor, Gordo: Attend to the lawsuits with your father-in-law, your accountants, Mario Batali (for stealing Batali’s Spotted Pig name in Europe) and every other human being who’s ever set foot in a restaurant.

POLITICAL SOAP-BOXING

Obnoxious worldviews, hard to take from close friends, are more insufferable from strangers on restaurant floors. A chat with a sommelier at Bill’s Food & Drink about unfiltered wine prompted a disquisition on the evils of Monsanto’s alleged plot to kill us with food additives. Save it for Union Square.

CAULIFLOWER “STEAK”

It isn’t worth the dough anywhere, not even at Cesare Casella’s splendid Salumeria Rosi Parmacotto, on Madison Avenue where an olive-oiled chunk of grilled crucifer — ahem, “bistecca cavolfiore” — is $29. If you must have a “steak” not of the animal kingdom, The Marrow’s mighty hen o’ the woods is the one (and preferable to the restaurant’s title dish, “The Marrow”).

BOGUS SOUNDS

It’s bad enough to be subjected to “In the Still of the Night,” a two-minute-and-59-second 1956 tune by the Five Satins, which everyone alive has heard roughly 100,000 times. It’s worse to hear it done by groups not the Five Satins. Can any restaurant which substitutes cheap covers on its soundtrack for doo-wop “classics” be trusted serving raw fish?

NOT ON THE MENU

Grape & Vine, Frederick Lesort’s new place in the Jade Hotel, promises “everything you want in a dining experience,” including “artisanal, market-driven fare” in an “elegant and artsy setting.” But no one mentioned what we didn’t want: a loud, live jazz band and singer in a near-empty room on Monday night. “It’s our new Jazz at the Jade,” was the cheerful explanation. Adele’s “Someone Like You” was not their forte. Be warned.

HIDEOUS DESSERTS

The Fernet Branca ice-cream sandwich (right) at Pearl & Ash takes the cake as the most stomach-churning meal-ender in the history of gastronomy. It easily worst-ed red bean-filled churros at Masaharu Morimoto’s Tribeca Canvas.

But the inanities are everywhere. Cease and desist with “deconstructed” cannoli, sundaes or anything else.

ON A POSITIVE NOTE …

Amid so much zaniness, an act of common-sense hospitality seems like a miracle borne of divine visitation.

You know how places won’t transfer your bar bill to the table, even 6 feet away? At Casa Mezcal, on Orchard Street, they cheerfully transferred it to a table on another floor.

Our “mezcarinhas” and the bill made their way with us down a flight of stairs from the lounge, onto the sidewalk and into the dining room.

And — imagine this — with smiles. Now, that’s “fine dining” — no tablecloths needed.

scuozzo@nypost.com